


This Bird Has Flown

by Unopposed



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, College, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-07
Updated: 2018-04-07
Packaged: 2019-04-19 20:24:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14245047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unopposed/pseuds/Unopposed
Summary: Written from Dean's POV. Based off of Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami.





	This Bird Has Flown

I was 18 then, a bright young student headed towards greatness. Finally completely on my own for the first time ever. The cold harsh winter that had just passed over northern New York still settled in my bones, with the rains of April soon taking its place. Living on a college campus, budgeting my meals so that I would be able to survive the next few months, let alone passing all of my classes with high marks. A young, naive teenager.

Eighteen Years have gone by, but I can still remember every sound and feeling from when I was with him, every smile that crossed my face and why it happened. Every time i think back to those few months, everything comes rushing back in a tidal wave that i can barely control. Not that i want to, it’s nice to feel again sometimes, even though the pain of the loneliness he caused me still lingers in the back of my mind, as it always has and always will. He made me the happiest I had ever been, and probably will ever be in that short lived time. I remember walking with him to class in February, with valentine's day looming over us. We were never lovers, far from it, but I loved him as much as anyone has ever loved anybody else. He was my world.

“Memory is a funny thing. When I was in the scene I hardly paid it any  
attention. I never stopped to think of it as something that would make  
a lasting impression, certainly never imagined that 18 years later I  
would recall it in such detail. I didn't give a damn about the scenery  
that day. I was thinking about myself. I was thinking about the  
beautiful girl walking next to me. I was thinking about the two of us  
together, and then about myself again. I was at that age, that time of  
life when every sight, every feeling, every thought came back, like a  
boomerang, to me. And worse, I was in love. Love with  
complications. Scenery was the last thing on my mind.”

Now, though, the scene is the first thing that comes to mind. The fog over the townhouses that students lived in, the slightly damp bricks on the ground at our feet, an indication that spring would soon come. The smell in the air, and how every so often you would get a hint of weed, but that was only natural given the circumstances. I remember the way the wind felt, how it was loud and fierce as it brushed past my hair and into my ears. I remember how cold it was, cold enough to need a coat but if you wore it for too long you would start sweating. Weather is a funny thing.

Even so, my memory has grown increasingly dim, and I have already forgotten any number of things. Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I've forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud? Be that as it may, it's all I have to work with. Clutching these faded, fading, imperfect memories to my breast, I go on writing this book with all the desperate intensity of a starving man sucking on bones.

What I do remember is the way he smelled, the way when he would walk a little bit ahead of me, the wind would blow his scent towards me. He reminded me of my face cream, how it smelled minty at first and then drifted into a soothing darker, almost musty smell. He always smelled the same, and you could tell he put in effort into how he appeared to other people, it was one of the most important things to him, although he would never admit that, not to me or even to himself. I still remember telling him I liked the way he smelled.

“You smell really good today, like, really good.” This was one of our first times talking, when he still looked at me like I was his world.

“Thank you! That actually means a lot to me.” I wish everything I said to him meant that much. I wanted to make him feel like he deserved to be loved. He deserved to know that he smelled good, I don’t care if it made me seem weird.

“You’re welcome, I just thought you should know.”

“I appreciate it.”

He smelled the same that day, walking to class, I can still remember. The thought now fills me with almost unbearable sorrow. There’s an interesting way that people act when they’re not appreciated enough, they lean into your compliments almost as if you were giving them a hug, but would never let it be known that they appreciate them other than the small glimpse of light that shines through their eyes for a second; because they know they’re finally worth something to somebody.

Once, long ago, when I was still young, when the memories were far more vivid than they are now, I often tried to write about him. But I couldn't produce a line. I knew that if that first line would come, the rest would pour itself onto the page, but I could never make it happen. Everything was too sharp and clear, so that I could never tell where to start - the way a map that shows too much can sometimes be useless. Now, though, I realize that all I can place in the imperfect vessel of writing are imperfect memories and imperfect thoughts. The more the memories of Castiel inside me fade, the more deeply I am able to understand him.

I knew whatever we had was over from the moment I received the text. Those four simple words repeated over in my mind, again and again, until i could barely stand to even unlock my phone lest i see them.

Don’t Text: We Need To Talk (Read 9:37pm)

I remember exactly where I was, and what I was doing the moment I looked down at my phone. Adam had just driven Jo and I to a Walmart about a mile away, at this point being a routine to us, we had perused the isles for about an hour, talking our ways through endless dimly lit isles of snacks and candy. Late night trips were always just an excuse we used to be with each other when life got too stressful to just “hang out”. In the back of my mind I knew something was coming the whole ride there and back, a dark cloud of doubt looming in the back of my mind while we discussed who our new dealer should be. (The old guy was charging us too much; $20 per brownie). It was mundane conversation for college students, something we had all almost memorized. After the getting to know each other part of the friendship halted, the circumstantial part began.

Adam was always standoffish, if not a little bit rude in the beginning. I would like to blame it on his lack of genuine connection with other human beings, but he seemed like an alright guy. I was introduced to him when we were freshman, he had been friends with my roommate for awhile at that point, but I had never met him. When i finally did, he did not live up to the hype that surrounded him. A boy that was not yet a man, around 6 foot and a medium build with dyed black hair that used to be blonde. Poor guy played too many games of risk and ultimately lost the battle over luck, resulting in the box dye that now sat on his head. It had been almost a year until he finally decided to shave his head in order to get his natural color back.

In many ways, Adam reminded me of myself. The same dark sense of humor, and yet with the immense capability to love, and to love the wrong people. It seemed too often I found people just like us, ones who deserved the utmost respect from people around them, but never received it. Adam had been enamored with this girl in our freshman class, a psychology major with a habit of falling in unrequited love with our professors, or older men in general. Understandable, since an angsty teenage boy can be a little overbearing at times, not to mention immature. To Adam’s credit, she never directly admitted she was not in love with him, but he never got confirmation of the other side, either.

The day after I got the text, Adam and I played a card game together. All night I wondered if we fit each other, how we even became friends. I decided it was by circumstance, by chance we had many friends in common, since us two together didn’t have too much in common on the surface. He acted awkwardly, and so did I, you could tell we weren’t comfortable with each other at the time, as if we had just met one another. He had no idea what was going on with me, how heartbroken I was in that room that night, and I had no clue how his life was going in return. It was almost refreshing to have someone who appreciated my presence but didn’t ask any questions I didn’t want to answer. One could say we had a mutual understanding of each other, at the very least.

I remember later that week when he asked me to come down to the lounge we always did work in together. I had a meeting in half an hour but I did anyways. He was writing an essay, nothing too long, only four pages. The problem was that he had drank almost twelve cups of coffee, two monster energy drinks, and he had taken adderall, something he wasn’t prescribed. Our group had a long standing joke of how he should be dead, and I didn’t believe them until I saw him that morning. He couldn’t stand to make eye contact for longer than a second, his eyes constantly darting around. He was the image of a college student, someone so on the edge of destruction that just keeps holding on. Over dramatic and naive, he represented how a lot of us felt on the inside.

He described that night as the first time he had ever felt pure ecstasy, the first night that he had ever really felt love in his life. Although this love wasn't with a person, but inside himself, I enjoyed the sentiment all the same. Blame it on the adderall, but I think he needed that boost of happiness. I stayed with him while he finished his essay, sending an email out to my professor saying I was going to be late. Adam doesn’t need to know i did that, though.

He hadn’t slept since Wednesday, he said, and it was Friday when this happened. No wonder he was fighting so hard to stay awake. I can only imagine what he was feeling, the stress of being a college student on top of having unrequited feelings for a girl he talked to and was around every single day, I don’t blame him for what he did.

Later that day, when I believed he was asleep, Charlie saw him in Starbucks with her. A picture sent to me, with him looking down on her with fondness in his eyes even though he was probably dead tired. Her completely unaware as to how lucky she was to have someone look at her that way. Such a mundane interaction, ordering a drink, turned into a love story in his mind. Maybe that would be the time she looked at him the same way, maybe when i order this drink she’ll fall in love with the sound my voice makes, or how polite I am. Hope is a drug that love fuels.  
Did you know that when you like somebody, even if you’re dead tired and can barely stand, you resist the urge to yawn around them? The adrenaline from being around the person you like stops you from yawning. I never saw him yawn around her.

I learned to look for signs like these when I got desperate enough to use psychology to figure out if he liked me or not. I wonder if Adam ever knew these tricks, and if when she yawned around him he brushed it off like I did, in hopes that maybe it wasn’t true.

He asked my roommate to kiss him when he was drunk that night. Maybe it was the alcohol, maybe it was the loneliness. I can’t say I wasn’t ever a victim to both of those at the same time. Maybe too often. My roommate said no, thankfully. I don’t think they would ever kiss somebody they weren’t in a relationship with.

He came over to our room later and gave me a hug, something i wasn’t accustomed to from him since he had a problem with touching. He leaned into my shoulder and made a sound of contentment. We stayed like that for awhile, which I didn’t mind, it was something we both needed at the time, a mutual understanding between us, that again, we felt no need to talk about.

I had spent every day with Castiel until this moment, until someone finally decided to let it slip. I remember walking with him to class, I loved the way he smiled as I talked to him about everything and nothing. It was sort of a smirk, not quite a full smile but you could tell i made him happy. His hair was usually styled to perfection, with a small swoop at the top, almost like a ski slope. His eyes were kind, although it hurt me to look into them for too long, the bright blue color always catching me off guard when I happened to glance his way.

He walked with a sort of confidence in his stride, although i knew that he was anything but confident in the way he looked. He often told me that he was ugly, that he didn’t deserve to be loved. I couldn’t tell him how wrong he was, I would never be able to tell him how attractive i found him, for fear of losing him as a friend.

I found a different kind of love in him, one that made me happy but also unbearably frustrated at the same time. He was harsh on himself and others, but he was always kind to me. He smiled and told me jokes, and held my hand to make me feel better. I melted into his presence, sinking into every word he said to me. When we were alone, it was different, he was kind, he was soft, he was almost real. When we were with our friends he was cruel, not to me, but I think he had his mind made up that he had to be someone he wasn’t.

He was always someone who had to have control at every turn, he was someone who got bored too easily and who could never find the right person to love him. It’s not that he couldn’t be loved, it was that nobody he wanted to love him would.

We spent that week together, we spent too much time together for any normal friendship. We touched too much for any normal friendship.

One of those days was something that gave me a real glimpse of hope, something that made me think, “Yeah, maybe this can work.”. We had gotten lunch together at one of our regular spots, we had both ditched people for each other and wanted somewhere they wouldn’t find us. It was a big campus, so that wasn’t too hard, but I think the thrill of it, and knowing we did a rude thing just to be with each other, was a little more exciting. He told me about his love of reading, and we went to a local bookstore later that day. I watched him peruse the aisles, with a look of joy on his face i can’t quite describe. We were genuinely happy in that moment, him with his books, me with him. I decided he could love, if he could love books this much, maybe he could find something in me that was worth looking like that at.

I’m not surprised i thought of him this way, everything he did was enticing to me, alluring in some shape or form. He was beautiful, a goal that I could never attain, something that was unreachable and yet so close to me.

“If i could spend my whole life surrounded by books and without people, I would do it,” he told me this while we were together. I’ll admit, it hurt me at the time but I soon learned to understand that what he meant was only the truth. He didn’t enjoy attention, he didn’t particularly love giving attention, either. But for some reason, he stayed with me.

I met him through a mutual friend, although we soon discovered we had classes together and formed a bond outside of each others friend groups. One of his best friends was Jo, someone who i connected with as well but on a different level, what Jo and I had was more clear and precise, you could tell we liked each other.

Jo was a bit different. We had met our second semester of college, since I liked a different friend of hers at the time. She was unconventional, a natural beauty who didn’t need makeup with unkempt curls ruling her head, and a face she liked to call trustworthy, due to its round shape.

“Who wouldn’t trust a circle?”, something she was often heard saying.

She was right though, everybody trusted her. That night at Walmart she told me I had an aura about me, something calming and reassuring, a presence that was felt, one that made her feel welcomed. Adam agreed. I still can’t decide if that was because he thought he needed to or because he felt the same way. Again, I trusted her, so i didn’t argue with her, maybe he felt that way too.

Her heartbreak manifested in a different way than Adam’s and mine did. Hers was more valuable, people would have pitied her. 

She was in a relationship for about a year or so, before she found out her partner cheated on her with a much younger guy the week before prom. Jo spent the whole summer resentful, trying to get her back, before coming to college and deciding to get over it. Too bad for that girl, though, because Jo was an amazing person.

Every time i saw Jo she greeted me with a smile and I would always tell her how much she meant to me, I never wanted her to forget it. But there was one difference that set her apart from Castiel more than anything.

Jo loved me. Castiel never did.


End file.
